Spartacus

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  The Gauls knew nothing of the Death Ring that the Germans could form in a desperate hour, and formed now, the great schiltrouns of the forests. Against these for a time the Roman attack broke in vain. Then the pressure of sheer numbers broke the circles, and the legionaries slaughtered at pleasure. But even while Crassus wheeled in his horse to charge the rear of the schiltrouns a shout arose and men lifted their eyes and saw on the crest of the hills the shine of fresh standards, the serpent standards of Spartacus.

  [v]

  Crassus faced about his legions, but the Thracian flung the fresh Bithynians against them, driving a wedge through the Roman ranks, himself leading the battle, axe in hand. Crassus had his bucinators blow the retreat, calculating to retire the legions still unbroken.

  But again his calculations missed the generalship of the Gladiator. Spartacus sprayed fresh line on line of slaves on the Romans, wheeling off each line after it had engaged but a few minutes in battle. No troops might withstand such onset or such tactics. The Fourteenth legion broke and fled, pitilessly pursued by the Thracians. The rest of the Romans drew off in good order.

  The battle was to Spartacus, as once to Pyrrhus. But of the eighteen thousand Gauls and Germans a bare three thousand survived. With these fell Castus, as has been told, who loved Spartacus, and never knew him; and Gannicus, who hated the Gladiator, and was killed in his sleep.

  The Mountains of Petelia

  [i]

  THE slave army was again encompassed by mountains.

  But this time it was summer and retreat, the mountains the brush-hung slopes of Petelia, not the passes of Mutina. In the dry air the withering vegetation seemed sometimes to take fire and burn before the wearied eyes of the marching slaves. High overhead carrion birds followed the long, straggling march that wound through the valleys, deeper and deeper into Calabria. The slaves marched with dragging feet and panting breath, the northern men with a lurching weariness, their tongues licking parched lips. In the rear the Thracian Legion beat forward stragglers from the German and Gaulish remnant: and themselves would pause and lean on their spears, and peer up at the enfolding mountains with heat-hazed eyes, seeking fresh-water springs where they might fling themselves full length in thirst, lapping at the water slowly, like exhausted dogs.

  Spartacus pressed on, deeper and deeper into the mountains that opened, deserted, before him. Crassus’ messengers had been ahead, at their orders the inhabitants had fired the crops and driven off the herds, and hidden their granaries under earth and manure. Enraged, the slaves left in their trail a line of blazing homesteads which lighted on the pursuit of Scrofas, the quaestor whom Crassus had sent to follow and keep touch with the slave retreat.

  Kleon rode in the rear of the Thracian rearguard, he had taken over that duty after the desertion of Castus and Gannicus, no longer the secretary and councillor of the Gladiator but (and he thought of this with a wry twist of lips) a eunuch-general of the Free Legions. Bithynians and Egyptians well able to endure the heat rode with him a motley collection of mounts – Italiot ponies, great heavy-limbed horses from Cisalpine Gaul, a half-score light Arabs: all spoil of this battle, that raid, or yon loot. Now and again they would wheel about and stare back through the westwards valleys. But Scrofas was a dull and cautious commander, he marched many stadia in the rear of the slaves, shepherding them forward into the summer heats and famine of Calabria.

  And Kleon, with his irony tempered now by the adversity that ground upon it, wondered what plan the Thracian had that he led them so, wondered while he knew what the end of the venture would be. Twice they had planned to march on Rome, twice failed. The second time, even after the desertion of the Gauls and Teutones, they might still have marched on the City of the Masters, as he and the Jew had urged Spartacus to do. Let Crassus devour the deserters, and, while he devoured, the Free Legions descend on Rome and devour a fenceless city. But Spartacus had refused. ‘We’ll save what we can of the Northern folk. They’ve fought beside us long.’

  So, in forced marches, they had come on the scene of the second Battle of the Lake, made that salvation that Spartacus had promised: and sold Rome in the task. Then into the mountains of Calabria.

  Whither? Where?

  [ii]

  Spartacus halted his van that night around the buildings of a great deserted plantation. Here in other days many hundred slaves had toiled at the wheat harvests of Calabria, their kennels with their rusted chains lay broken and deserted – but for one into which the slaves peered and saw there a mouldering cadaver, a slave abandoned to die of starvation, through neglect or deliberate intention. Spartacus himself walked about the plantation and looked at the kennels of the slaves, then around him at the footsore, ragged army he had led into those mountains – he had led to so many strange ventures since that night when the first of them climbed from the pits of Batiates.

  Sun and wind and rain in their faces, battle and wounds and hunger to endure, the snows of Mutina and Rhegium, the blistering heats of the hills of Petelia: yet that had been better than this once lived in these mouldering kennels before the Revolt, this life of stripes and despair and sodden hatred. And again in the great slave leader there grew that feeling of a passionate identity with the slave host that he led – the feeling that he was one with them, lived in their lives, tired with their tiredness, exulted in their hopes. His tribunes questioned his plans: the great host never did – unless deserters like Gannicus or Castus misled it with lies and rhetoric. And he knew now, with a great faith, the reason for that. None of his marchings and plannings had been his alone, but an essence of the dim wills in the minds of the multitude, in the Negro slave who had starved and shivered up by the Rhegine dyke, the Thracian shepherd who limped with a bloody heel, the Bithynian porter who disputed with the Thracian land-serf the name for victory and defeatlessness. He was but a voice for many, the Voice of the voiceless.

  And he knew that even in this march into Calabria, when he had seen so plainly that never now might the Free Legions conquer Italy, he followed as much as led the dim mind of the host. The Gauls and Teutones were a remnant: the rest were men of the Middle Seas, if they could reach and capture Brindisium, suddenly, by strategy, they might find there ships enough to take them from Italy.

  And then the curtain closed down, he might not see beyond that.

  He spoke with Kleon and Gershom that night, the three of them sitting at meat, corn and the flesh of a kid, the while the maid Mella served them. There was no sign of Scrofas: the Free Legions had yet enough food: the air was blue with the smoke of its fires, and sprayed with the warm stench of humankind. Kleon looked at the other two.

  ‘We three alone to survive! Remember the crowded councils in Nola? Though I can remember little but the crowd, what we said or did grows dim already.’ He brooded for a little, and then laughed. ‘As this story will grow, dim and confused, in the ages to be, the story of the slaves’ insurrection. They’ll mix the marches and forget our names, and make of Gannicus a loyal hero and of Gershom here a strayed Gaul from Marsala! Poets and the writers of tales will yet tell it, perhaps, each setting therein his own loves and hates, with us only their shadowy cup-bearers. All dim and tangled in the tales they’ll tell, except their beginnings with that spring when we roused the slaves. And all the rest a dream or a lie.’

  ‘So they do not make me a Roman,’ said Gershom ben Sanballat, ‘they may lie as they will.’

  Then the Strategos told them of his plan to capture Brindisium, and Gershom nodded, combing his beard.

  ‘This from the first was what I advised you, Spartacus. And now you follow my advice, and once I’d have rejoiced, pointing to my own wisdom, and scorning your lack of it. Yet—’

  Kleon smiled at him his slight, dark smile.

  ‘And yet, Bithynian?’

  ‘Yet the Strategos had the right of it, Scythian. Once we might have conquered Rome, all Italy, we might have built under Spartacus a kingdom of slaves with the Masters underfoot. Or your Republic, with neither
Master nor slave. But that a devil was against us.’

  ‘There are neither Gods nor devils. Only the Fates, who are mindless.’

  ‘There is the One God,’ Gershom said, ritually. ‘But he is reserved for the Jews.’

  Then Spartacus said a strange thing, his eyes remote. ‘There’s a God in men. But an Unknown God.’

  And they fell silent for a little, till the Thracian roused. ‘We march at dawn. How is it with the Bithynians?’

  ‘Ill enough. But they’ve food.’

  ‘So have the Thracians – a little. And your Gauls, Kleon?’

  The Greek smiled that twisted smile once bitter.

  ‘They march astounded with a eunuch for leader. I think I fail in some duty they’re too polite to name. Perhaps the fertilization of the Mother Goddess – for otherwise their women will be barren.’

  Gershom growled, rising, ‘Then they’d need of a eunuch tribune. Their women spawned litters like dogs from the day the Free Legions were formed.’

  And the Greek returned to the lines of the Gauls and lay down with a light cloak over him; and the Gauls took him as their leader, for he had wisdom, though mutilated to a no-man by the Masters.

  Gershom of Kadesh went back to his legion, to the tent of Judith, again heavy with child. She woke as he came and rose, stoopingly, to bring him wine. But he made her sit and share the wine that he drank. And he looked at her, big with child, with angry, kindly eyes.

  ‘Rest, woman, for we march at dawn to-morrow.’

  She asked where and he did not say. Then Judith said: ‘I don’t think we’ll ever see Judaea again, or our unborn son either, Gershom. Yet I’m glad you have brought my womb to fruit, glad to have lain with you, though no son may ever say the prayer in the Temple when we die.’

  Then Gershom saw there was upon her the fancies of a woman with child; and he answered nothing, seeking sleep; and the woman lay beside him, but not to sleep, hearing long the crying of the nightbirds over the camp of Spartacus.

  The Gladiator himself could find no sleep. And again, a strange whim upon him, he went out alone (for Ialo had died by Lake Lucania and he had chosen no other guard) and walked through the ruined lines of kennels where once the slaves had lain; and in his heart he felt all the bitterness and tears, and all the wild stolen delight of a moment’s ease, that these other slaves had known. And he cursed the Masters, yet without hate; and went back to his room in the house of the plantation, and found the maid Mella waiting him there, slight and brown, weary with her day’s march up through the hills of Petelia.

  But now, looking on her with seeing eyes for the first time in many months, the Gladiator saw she was a child no longer, but a woman in her few years. Under the torn tunic her breasts pushed forth their buds, red and sweet, and her throat had lost gauntness, round and full; and he saw the cloud of her hair about her watching face, and the cloud of wonder that dimmed her eyes as she looked at him.

  He drew her towards him, she came with a wondering sob, he forgot the Free Legions, his hands cupping those flowers of spring that had burgeoned in the summer heats, the curving buds of desire that awaited his coming. And the little Sicel maid sobbed again, as though a God held her; and Spartacus took her to his bed, and she wept, kissing him, shuddering to a wild ecstasy in his grasp. And all night she lay there, the God with her, and knew fulfilment and agony that merged in delight and so in sleep; and they slept together, his head on her breast, till the blowing of the bucinae roused them at dawn.

  [iii]

  But Scrofas gave them no rest. It seemed to him, cautious commander though he was, that this retreat into mountains had developed into headlong rout. Twice the slave army had wheeled so that, describing three-quarters of the arc of a circle, it again neared the outlet of the Petelian hills. Confident in his quarry as a panic-stricken beast, Scrofas pursued at its heels.

  The heat grew ever more intense, so that Gauls and Teutones fainted in the strength of it, or straggled by the way and were cut down by Scrofas’s velites. But the Eastern and African slaves rejoiced in the sun’s geniality despite their footsore weariness. Marching through rugged defiles, they would lift their voices in long, wailing songs, long columns marching into the haze of evening. Spartacus would rein in the great white stallion and look down at his men march past, with a new twist of compassion in his heart, hearing the voice of the Slave, a thing that it seemed to Kleon also he would never forget.

  They had not realized, the slave rank and file, that double-twist back through the Petelian mountains. But both Kleon and Gershom ben Sanballat knew of it; and now at length learned the reason from Spartacus.

  Scrofas knew nothing of this reason. As the slave march quickened with each day, so he hastened his pursuit. Crassus lay still in Lucania, gathering reinforcement to follow slowly and meet the Gladiator when at length he was run to earth. But what if the Gladiator should emerge from the mountains, pass the camp of Licinius in the dark, and descend on Rome in a last desperate raid?

  Sweat studded the plump yellow cheeks of Scrofas at the thought. He despatched his cavalry to overtake and attack the slaves.

  They vanished into the bright, crystalline air of the afternoon. The mountains towered windless, the sky unclouded, dust rose and played like a spume about the feet of the smarting legionaries. Meantime, the Thracian legion of the Spartacists, having ambushed and dispersed the Roman cavalry to the rear of a narrow and nameless defile, marched back and garrisoned that defile and awaited the arrival of Scrofas.

  Spartacus detached Gershom in command, while he himself waited in the rear with the Bithynians and the remnants of the Gaulish and German forces. The Jew had great rocks gathered in heaps about the ledges of the pass. Then he commanded the Thracians to lie down amid the rocks and await the signal of the horns.

  Now it was a little after noon when Scrofas and his legions came to that pass that had no name, a low defile in the mountains of Petelia. As they climbed a wild shouting broke all around them, the rallying-cry of the slaves:

  ‘Libertas! Libertas!’

  Scrofas’s horse was killed under him by a rock. The mountains seemed vomiting rocks on the Roman march. Through the dust of their descent the Jew flung forward half his men.

  Nothing might abide that charge. When the slave horns summoned the Thracians to retire, half the Roman force was in rout and disorder. Nevertheless, Scrofas, remounted, had the legionaries lashed into rank again, and sent forward his sagittarii in an effort to dislodge the slaves.

  But the rocks defended them. Then Scrofas urged the wearied Fifteenth up against the slave position. Twice they attacked, but the second time more cautiously, for news had been brought to Scrofas that a path wound round the right-ward mountain whereby he might assail the slaves in the rear.

  He despatched his Second legion on that mission. The sun wheeled towards evening. Then, in the pass behind the Thracian ambuscade, arose a wild sound of shouting and battle. Scrofas’s Second legion had been trapped by the waiting Gladiator in the valley behind the pass.

  It was the signal for Gershom ben Sanballat. His Thracians rose, freshened, and charged on the hesitant ranks of the Fifteenth legion. Scrofas saw that the day was lost, and fled through the hills till he came to the camp of Crassus.

  All that night his routed legions straggled into the camp of the provincial praetor, waiting beyond the mountains and expecting to hear that the Spartacists had been trapped. But instead he heard of the slaves as victors in yet another battle, victors encamped on the battlefield and devouring the flesh of the dead Roman horses. And once again a wave of cold apprehension fell on Crassus.

  The Gladiator was inconquerable. He might march from the mountains against Rome itself.

  Crassus prepared to retreat.

  The Stallion

  [i]

  THAT night, for the first time in that hot Italian summer, the rain began to fall, softly, a whisper and wisp in the darkness, shining white veils, translucent, through the slave-camp at the hither side of
the battlefield. The slave host stirred to its coming with hungry lips, so slight its fall it might not dampen the fires, men lay with open mouths and uncovered bodies at that descent of the warm summer rain; and the wounded, groaning, stretched out their hands to it, raining mist from the summer night.

  And the hills stirred, and the dying plants raised their heads, and the earth moved and put forth new smells, stirring to a fresh and unforeseen life, wakening and moving in the raining dark. And a little wind presently came with the rain, driving it east in the track of Scrofas’s rout; and on that wind came some scent that caught in the throats of the slaves, so that they stirred to slurred speech, and a wild, strange laughter, and moments of brooding that passed into quick action, singing, and shouting, and declamation. Beyond the passes the great army of the Masters lay shielding Rome. The Masters?

  Who were the Masters?

  Who had bestridden Italy like a God these last two years, what army abided undefeated the attack of the Serpent standards? And the slaves wept and cursed with slobbering lips, tearing at the flesh of the dead horses, peering through the raining night into the unlighted east. The Masters—

  THEY THEMSELVES WERE THE MASTERS! These the slaves, the armies of the Republic they had beaten from battle to battle. The Masters – these, who fled whenever the Strategos turned upon them! And a wild pride came on the slaves, and they swore they would march no more through the mountains. Italy was theirs and lay waiting their taking. And they sharpened their swords and licked hungry lips, with the little wind in their faces that was kindling all the hills.

  And the women of the slave army felt on their faces that same rain, in their hearts the same thoughts as their men. They had tramped the length and breadth of the Peninsula, it under their feet, it was theirs, THEIRS, bought in the travail of the unending roads, in the travail of wounds and death and birth, the horde of children that had been born in the snow-smitten, sun-smitten camps of revolt. The Masters – they were the Masters, they who went ragged and hungry. And they looked on their children crawling out with little eager hands to grasp at the rain and laugh at its touch; and a fierce, weeping tenderness took the slave women. These should never endure what they had endured, to them sun and security and the citizen’s name when the Free Legions went down on Rome.